Sharpen images with Perl and GIMP

Installation

To tell GIMP to parse the smartsharp script when it launches, you must install the script in GIMP's plugin directory with the following command line:

gimptool-2.0 --install-bin smartsharp

The gimptool-2.0 utility is provided by the Debian libgimp2.0-dev package. So that GIMP can understand Perl scripts, you also need to install libgimp2.0 and libgimp-perl.

Significant Order

If you are changing the image in any other way, resizing, or correcting the colors, make sure that sharpening is the last step you perform. Otherwise, the various methods could step on each other's toes and possibly even reverse the sharpening process.

Of course, if an image is badly out of focus, no kind of manipulation is going to make a mega-sharp masterpiece of it; techniques like the tricks I cover here in this article are just patchwork. Out-of-focus images contain less information than sharp images – removing information from an image is easy, but adding information is just about as difficult as getting toothpaste back into the tube.

Graphic artists often face the problem of turning a photograph into an image that will tile over a larger surface. This task is not as easy as it sounds, but if you’re up for the challenge, this tutorial will give you a first-hand look at some advanced tools in the GIMP toolkit.

In many cases, whole series of digital images need the same kind of modifications, which forces the photo-grapher to repeat the same steps time and time again in GIMP. Have you ever considered retouching in Perl?